And the whole thing will take just a minute to heat up in the microwave.

Try doing that with a 30-pound Butterball®.

This past spring, three LSU undergraduate students—Madalyn Thibodaux,
a senior from Parks, Amy Jones, a junior from Port Allen, and Lyndsey White,
a junior from New Orleans—competed at the 2008 Research
Chefs Association (RCA) Annual Conference in Seattle, where they took
home a top-five finish in the Student
Culinology Competition.

The trio initially came together in October 2007, where they were presented
with a “simple” plan: create a frozen meal based on traditional
Northwest cuisine that would retail for $9.99 for two servings, submit the
proposal to the RCA, get named one of the five national finalists to compete
in Seattle, ship the aforementioned frozen meal to Seattle, microwave it
to defrost it, make an identical Gold Standard meal from scratch in 90 minutes,
and present them both to the judges for comparison.

Easy as pie—a very complicated pie.

LSU had never entered a team in the competition before, and while that
made the women pioneers in the food
science department, it also meant they went in without the benefit of
prior experience. Department Head John Finley and alumnus Darryl Holliday
worked with the team in the developmental stages, with Finley providing
the students with resources while Holliday honed their knife skills. Ultimately,
though, it all came down to what the trio could cook up in the kitchen,
and what the judges were hungry for when the proposals were mailed in.

“Madalyn left me all these messages, and I called her back yelling,
‘What? What do you want?’” said Jones. “She said,
‘Oh my God, Amy, we made it.’ I started screaming in the middle
of the Rec., I was standing in line at the Smoothie King® screaming,
‘Oh my God, we’re going to Seattle.’”

The meal the judges had deemed finalist-worthy was grilled mahi-mahi buerre
blanc topped with toasted walnuts and cherries over a bed of sweet potato
medallions, alongside toasted sourdough green beans. In addition, the LSU
team was the only finalist with a dessert—honey granola-encrusted
raspberry-poached apples.

“Our dish was very colorful and very healthy,” explained Thibodaux,
who, in addition to her team placing, also received a $1,500 Research
Chefs Foundation scholarship at the conference. “We used a lot
of vegetables and fruits. We had sweet potatoes, green beans, apples, raspberries,
and cherries. Our meal was more for a health-conscious individual who wanted
two servings or a couple who wanted a meal for convenience.”

While coming up with a delicious frozen meal was challenging enough—“When
was the last time you had a frozen meal that was so amazing that you thought
you could hardly wait to eat again?” Jones said—the act of making
the gold standard from scratch proved doubly difficult.

“We had to grill our fish,” said Thibodaux. “We practiced
it a thousand times, and we put down on our equipment list that we needed
a grill. I called ahead of time to see if they had a grill available and
they told me they did, but we got up there and they said there was not one
available to us.”

Already operating in cramped quarters—the competition took place
in a hallway, with the teams cooking on tables pushed up against a wall
while cameramen filmed their every move—the team had to think on the
fly to come up with an alternative.

“We got two tiny omelet burners,” said Jones. “I used
an oven rack and I grilled the fish over a flame the size of a quarter.”

“The fish actually came out pretty nice looking,” Thibodaux
said. “We’re a creative bunch, and we’d improvised in
the past due to facilities [at LSU] because we didn’t always have
a grill to work on. We’d practiced that by improvising ahead of time,
but we didn’t think it would get brought into play up there.”

The lack of a grill was soon overshadowed by another problem that no amount
of MacGuyver-like improvisation could make up for, as a last-minute change
to the frozen meal before it was shipped to Seattle came back to haunt the
food scientists.

“When we began this competition we found the trays that we wanted
to use and they were sectioned off,” said White. “Then we decided
to use modified atmospheric packaging because it preserves the food much
better, but when we did that we had to use containers that didn’t
have sections. We decided to put the dessert in a separate container in
there, and we did that at the last minute not realizing it was not microwave
safe.”

“It was the most pathetic display,” laughed Jones. “Oh,
it was bad. The chefs were heating it, and I looked over and it was a melted
cup with raspberry spilling everywhere. I thought, ‘Oh God –
who wants to eat that?’

“No team had it down though, everybody had something they could’ve
done better. It was our first try, and compared to some of the other teams,
it really shocked me—we were the youngest team there. A lot of these
people had been in the industry for years and were chefs, and we didn’t
know the first thing about it. I guess we are a little better off than an
accounting major, but we’re more into the science.”

Despite the hiccups, the team acknowledged that merely making the final
five was an achievement, and the fact that the top three place-getters—Johnson
and Wales University, the University of Cincinnati, and Mississippi College
for Women—all had culinary schools, while LSU does not, did not go
unnoticed by the luminaries present at the conference.

“John Folse said he would hire all of [the LSU students],”
said Finley.

The competition was held on the first morning of the conference, leaving
the trio with four days to take in the Seattle sights and roam the halls
enjoying the RCA exhibits at the expo. Besides the endless networking opportunities
presented to them—all received internship and graduate school scholarship
offers—there were plenty of taste-testing opportunities to take advantage
of, though some turned out to be more appetizing than others.

“The weirdest thing we found was an egg-flavored marshmallow that
had been wrapped in bacon-flavored cotton candy,” said Jones. “I
went up there thinking, ‘Ooh, cotton candy,’ and I grabbed it
and put it in my mouth and wondered ‘Why was my cotton candy salty?’”

But while the three went out of their way to try anything they could during
their downtime in Seattle, after five months spent preparing for the competition,
there was one thing they weren’t in any hurry to see before them.

“I took them out to lunch afterwards,” Finley said, “and
nobody ordered mahi-mahi.”

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